Gibbon

Business idea: A high quality education that doesn't rely on gatekeepers to arbitrarily deny it to you.

Yeah, it's easy enough to find pretty much any book if you know what to search for. It's been that way for years.

Implementation in french is usually "Mise en Oeuvre", "Mise en place", "Application" or "Exécution" depending on the context.

In this example, implantation is probably more directly translated to "layout".

It's like noone here has ever heard of a part time job. I work 25 hours a week and still have 80-90 hours to do whatever I want.

Considering the average startup founder works about 50/hrs a week.. there's plenty of time.

Firefox 3.5 crashes frequently on both my macbook and my wife's older macbook. It's slow to load, sometimes slow to load some pages and hyperlinks occasionally don't actually work (mostly only on facebook.)

Roughly 11.5 million lines of code for the kernel.. That's way more than I would have imagined.. 5k lines a day are added and 2k are modified. (http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/IT-Workplace/68f20d4f-8ab9-40...)

IMHO it doesn't really jive with UNIX principles to have such a monolithic kernel.

I'm a designer and the two books I always recommend to non-designers and newbies are:

Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual (http://www.amazon.com/Design-Elements-Graphic-Style-Manual/d...)

and

The other is the complementary case studies book "Design Evolution" (http://www.amazon.com/Design-Evolution-Handbook-Principles-C...)

Also Graphically Speaking is useful if you want to know how a particular style is constructed (artistic, corporate, vintage etc.)and you need to be able to effectively communicate with other designers or clients. (http://www.amazon.com/Graphically-Speaking-Achieving-Designe...)

The library. I'm not kidding.

I still use CS2.. many of the printers I've worked with in the last few years still use Illustrator 9 and photoshop 7

Total manufacturing/distribution costs for a CD are around $2.20 with a wholesale price of $6.50.

The labels still get the $6.50 more or less for a digital album (although that's falling) but they no longer have to worry about manufacturing a portion of their products (CDs are still 80% of the market.. digital is 20%) so at best they knocked off 20% of their manufacturing costs thus far.

So now for an equal numbers of units shipped the total cost is $1.76 per unit.

The labels also have to pay mechanical royalties to the artists.

So prior to the internet: $6.50 x 250,000 units minus royalties would net them around $700,000 gross profit.

But they would have paid $250,000 as an advance to the artists.

Net profit would be something like $450,000 on the initial $250,000 investment plus ongoing manufacturing and marketing costs.

If they hit it big, they get rich, but a dud might be a money loser or at best barely profitable.

The digital sales would boost their net profit by $110,000 for the same number of units sold, all else being equal. They would get a 2.24x return on their investment.

Keep in mind 250,000 units is now pretty good for a successful artist now.. the biggest album last year only sold 2.8 million copies.

Artists don't get the shaft anymore than any other business person does.

Labels are just VC.. they risk investing a small amount of money in a very large number of artists (a few hundred thousand) on a hunch that it might pay off. Most don't work out, but the ones that do make up for the rest.

80% of sales come from 50,000 albums pulled from the entire history of recorded music.. not very good odds.

The real problem is that nobody is buying music anymore. Period. Unit sales are dropping off a cliff.

There was no bubble.. just a market whose time has come and gone, much like the fabled buggy-whip.

The record industry (as opposed to the music industry) was a 20th century anomaly. Prior to the invention of the gramophone, music was largely a participatory affair.. singing to pass the time while working, to celebrate at a social function, to amuse and entertain friends and family and to pass on folklore from generation to generation.

The record as a social object and the idolatry of the rock star were temporary aberations.

The live performance end of the music industry will likely survive, but once all the big stars of the last few decades die off, even that will likely shrink dramatically in size.

There is no "dark" market worth mentioning in this context. There are simply no significant sales beyond the major labels and their subsidiaries. The four major labels account for more than 80% of ALL music sold in the USA and the 1600 members of the RIAA account for more than 90%.

The topmost performers in the indie market may achieve some success on their own, as individuals, but in aggregate the total indie market is a disaster.

Google's extensive testing does not preclude the possibility that their design sucks. The original "simplicity" of their service was entirely accidental; if I'm not mistaken Sergei either didn't know enough html or didn't care enough to bother making it any more complicated.

Religiously testing will only lead to a local maximum and ignores the possibility that the design may have not been great to begin with.

Google's homepage is not even remotely close to the standard a highly competent minimalist designer would offer. Little attention to detail, remedial typographical choices, a 90's looking poorly executed Logo, random UI elements with no clear purpose. It's very much like an engineers interpretation of what a minimalist designer would do.. which is exactly what it is.

All of their products are on the utilitarian end of minimalist design and could stand to be improved significantly from an aesthetic perspective without actually changing the interface noticeably.

CD sales accounted for 80% of the 428 million units sold in 2008 (from all media).

In comparison there were just under a billion units sold in 1999 and the backstreet boys had the biggest album with over 16 million copies. Last year the top seller, Lil Wayne only sold 2.8 million. It took the b-boys just over a week for comparable sales at the peak of the market.

If I'm not mistaken, Norah Jones first album was the last to break the 10 million barrier.

Total units sold started dropping at an annual compounded rate of 6%/year in 1999 through 2004. With the introduction of iTunes in 2003, "album substitution" started to take hold and the decline accelerated. Albums were being replaced by single track downloads on iTunes at a rate of roughly 1.4 downloaded tracks per CD album. With an average of 12 tracks per cd.. that's an 88% drop in per unit sales (1.4 tracks are around $1 on iTunes vs. $16-$20 for the CD album).

The music industry is alive and well but the record industry has basically been obliterated.

Americans spend in the neighbourhood of $200/month on clothes? Wow.. I'm so far below that, I doubt I'm even in the 99% percentile on the low end.

If any of the musicians are ASCAP members, then you're going to need an ASCAP licence and you'll have to pay performance royalties unless you get legal agreements with all the artists to waive their royalties as a part of your fees.

There's also the whole copyright infringement issue and users uploading material they don't have the rights to. You'll need to monitor uploads constantly.

"Artists can pay" is a legal minefield.. lots of potential payola/pay-to-play/bribery issues unless it's made very clear that the artists are paying. Otherwise the more popular you get, the more likely you'll get the FCC crawling down your back.

The music industry is one of the most litigious on the planet.. you have to have balls of steel to play in that fishtank.

http://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2008/09/articles/internet-ra...

I had six daylight-balanced mini fluorescent bulbs in my living room and I had to remove three of them because they were blindingly bright. These are 8w bulbs.

I posted another article on these solar panels several hours earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=812551

The bottom of the article includes a link to a research paper:

http://precedings.nature.com/documents/1312/version/1/files/...

This is what I said the first time YikeBike was posted on HN:

"tiny wheelbase + forward centre of gravity + unexpected obstacle = faceplant."

No mention in the article that you can just do a "define keyword" in google and get the definition from a couple dozen dictionaries and in any language.

I actually had to check.. I haven't rebooted my server on Slicehost since I got the account, so it's been up 357 days.

Because your paying customers like newspapers but want the convenience of a website?

From Canada's profit 100 list:

Avg founder age: 43

62 have started multiple firms

3 firms on avg.

Avg workweek 58 hours

Graduate degrees 27

Sole founders 37

Co-founders 48

Female 6

Avg 5-yr growth rate: 2506%

The gamma in OS X has not been changed to "Microsoft's Standard" but rather to the standard used for the majority of the world's images and video. A gamma correction of 2.2 is necessary for NTSC video and is more or less equivalent to the gamma of the sRGB color space.

The Mac 1.8 gamma was a better match for print output but it's increasing irrelevance makes it only natural to increase the gamma for better video/image viewing.

Gamma explained: http://www.thehelpful.com/gammaexplained.html

The NYTimes example is by Khoi Vinh (http://www.subtraction.com/). He's certainly no design slouch, particularly when it comes to grid based layouts.

NYTimes is an enormously complex site. Given the ridiculous number of priorities they have to juggle, and number of people they have to please, I think they do an admirable job. The site has to balance looking like a historic newspaper with the constraints of the web.

I particularly like Vinh and Boulton's presentation "Grids are Good" http://www.lifeclever.com/khoi-vinh-mark-boulton-grids-are-g... which applies a grid layout to a Yahoo type homepage.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=428776 as one example.

"Don't make something unless it's both necessary and useful; But if it's both necessary and useful, don't hesitate to make it beautiful." - Shaker Dictum.

It's entirely possible that Craigslist is successful on account of its ugliness. It's also entirely possible that it's successful in spite of its ugliness. I'm inclined to believe the latter.

Aesthetics are extremely important. One can certainly succeed without beautiful design, but more beautiful products are perceived to be more useable.

On the one hand, the right designer could significantly improve the look and feel of Craigslist, without affecting it's structure: a carefully applied colour scheme, better typography, whitespace and a fine attention to detail would help.

On the other hand, Craigslist is the mother of all outliers. Everything they do seems totally counter-intuitive.

Is there room for improvement? Definitely. Should it be improved? It's worthy of a debate.

"who cares."

-Hackers -Musicians -Apple Fans -Behringer Customers -Behringer Haters -Behringer Competitors -IP Lawyers -Copyright Crusaders and so on.

Lots of Hacker News users are musicians. Lots of musicians are hackers. Lots of them own Behringer gear. Lots of them own Apple gear. Many of them are interested in issues pertaining to Trademark, Copyright, Patents, IP Theft and other legal issues.

There's also a follow-up to the article covering Behringer's notorious IP thefts over the years.

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/09/06/on-behringers-track...